The art world is run like a banana republic. It’s structured into
highly stratified classes. On top, a few plutocratic overlords, catered
to by bureaucracies of remora-like functionaries and lackeys, holding
sway over struggling supplicant masses of creative hopefuls, all
theoretically revolving around the production and presentation of the
product Art.

The focus of the rulers is not on the art itself. Their purpose is
assimilate status, influence and power. Art is just a vehicle for their
self-importance. To gain the favor of their masters, opportunistic
followers are made to understand to advance anywhere within this system,
certain rules must be obeyed, or certain criteria met.

Artistic quality isn’t an issue. Under the permissiveness of
relativism, anything goes-as long it falls under the approved formulas
of the establishment. Any aesthetic concerns are irrelevant compared to
adherence to the agenda.

Scorn must be directed at the appropriate targets: God, organized
religion, patriotism, free expression, Western civilization in general.
Claiming grievance confers virtue and enables claims for retribution.
Hostility must be displayed towards anyone who does not accept the
priorities of the elitists, or rejects the march towards collectivism.

The culture industries are just part of the larger problem. Our establishment is enforcing a tyranny of oikophobia,
the disdain of our heritage and traditions. From their strongholds in
the media, academia, administration and the arts, they are applying
their unified efforts to clear the slate of society for the Great Leap
Forward: a jump right back into feudalism, where the new aristocracy of
the well-connected will be secure in their unaccountable power.

But since the language of morality is used to disguise their
authoritarian ambitions, it creates some confusing contradictions.
Today’s establishment is a sorry display of hypocrisy. They are bigots
for Tolerance, Anarchists for Big Government. They are so open minded
they demand any dissenting viewpoints must be censored out of existence.
The perpetrators acknowledge no paradox though, as the self-regard
gained by espousing and conforming to the correct views overwhelms
self-awareness.

Being reduced to a tool for subversion has been very damaging to the
relevance and achievements of the contemporary art world. With all this
non-art related dogma assuming primacy in the culture industries,
contemporary art is bereft of inspiration. Cut off from eternal sources
of creativity by ideology, to compensate the art world has veered into a
surprising dead end.

Much of establishment contemporary art has become an inverted cargo cult.

The phenomenon of the cargo cult originally was observed when the
primitive tribal societies of the South Pacific encountered the advanced
cultures of the West. It reached a pitch of religious fervor after
World War II.

The industrial manufactured items of the newcomers amazed the remote
villagers of islands like New Guinea and Tanna. The strangers from over
the sea brought with them riches in the form of machines and
goods-airplanes, tools, medicines, canned food, radios and the like-made
from materials incomprehensible to what were practically Stone Age
people. The tribes decided surely such wonderful items must be made by
the gods.

As battles raged in the Pacific, the indigenous populations observed
the soldiers at work: marching around in uniforms, clearing runways,
talking on radios. In response the planes arrived, seemingly from
heaven, bringing to the islands the massive quantities of materials
needed for the war effort. To the natives who got to share some of the
magical items, this treasure-the technological output of developed
nations-came to be referred to collectively by the pidgin word cargo.

But when the war ended, the soldiers left. The flow of magic cargo
ceased. The tribesmen had lost access to the gifts from the gods.

The abandoned natives developed a plan to get back into divine favor.
Having no frame of reference for the ways of the modern world, they
interpreted the activities of construction and communications the
visitors performed as forms of ritual. The tribesmen would reenact the
rites they had seen the foreigners perform, recreate their ceremonial
objects. This would please the gods, who would start delivering the
cargo again-but this time, to the natives.

The islanders designed outfits based on military uniforms. They
drilled in cadence, carrying rifles of bamboo. They built wooden
aerials, constructed mock radios, clearing landing strips in the jungle,
placed decoy planes of straw on them. And waited.

Some are apparently waiting still for the
gifts to start descending from the heavens. Educated by missionaries,
the natives explain if the Christians can wait two thousand years for
Jesus to return, the natives are willing to give the cargo gods a few
decades to respond.

The natives of the South Pacific were
practicing a type of sympathetic magic. This concept of sympathetic
magic was explained in Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough:
“From the first of these principles, namely the Law of Similarity, the
magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by
imitating it.”By going through the same motions witnessed in the people
who received the cargo, the tribes believed they could summon the same
effect: the bestowal of divine treasure.

To our rational minds this is preposterous.
We understand the uselessness of evoking the facade of a machine without
the necessary functionalities being incorporated into it. What matters
is the inner workings, not the appearance.

And yet, a form of this magical thinking has
infected contemporary art. The subservience of art to political issues
derails the purpose of the artist. The prevalent dogma interferes with
the discovery of a personal artistic vision. So contemporary artists
attempt to imitate their way into a valid artistic experience.

In a stunning reversal, in our advanced
technological society, artists uncomprehendingly recreate inferior
approximations, parodying the objects and gestures of the past and the
primitive, trying in vain to summon the sense of awe and wholeness
present in the art of bygone ages. By mimicking and mocking the outer
forms of the originators, the artists hope the gods will arrive bearing
their eternal gifts-that these snotty knock offs will also rise to the
level of art.

The contemporary art world says both of these are works of art

The contemporary art world is a liar

The art market had been degraded to flim-flaming hucksters who hire
teams of technicians to create overwrought and overpriced versions of
cheap gags. This is still art, the so-called experts assure us. But who
the hell are they? Just some more cult members, in on the take. They
have destroyed their own credibility.

By embracing methods of pastiche, a tone of irony, and a poorly
concealed lust for power, today’s establishment artist can have no more
success in creating a legitimate art for this time than the Pacific
Islander can succeed in summoning a fleet of airplanes using his hand
carved radio....

For guidance I often seek out a bongo drummer-slash-raconteur.
We post this once a year, usually around Nobel Prize time.
Here's the musician riffing on science:

During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas,
such as that a piece of of rhinoceros horn would increase potency.
Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas--which was to try
one to see if it worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it.
This method became organized, of course, into science. And it
developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age.
It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in
understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing
that they proposed ever really worked--or very little of it did.

But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me
into a conversation about UFO's, or astrology, or some form of mysticism,
expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And
I've concluded that it's not a scientific world.

Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to
investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my curiosity
for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much
junk that I'm overwhelmed. First I started out by investigating various
ideas of mysticism and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks
and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that.
Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it's a
wonderful place; you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed.
I didn't realize how MUCH there was.

At Esalen there are some large baths fed by hot springs situated
on a ledge about thirty feet above the ocean. One of my most pleasurable
experiences has been to sit in one of those baths and watch the waves
crashing onto the rocky slope below, to gaze into the clear blue sky above,
and to study a beautiful nude as she quietly appears and settles into the
bath with me.

One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beautiful girl
sitting with a guy who didn't seem to know her. Right away I began
thinking, "Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful
nude woman?"

I'm trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her,
"I'm, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?"
"Sure," she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down
on a massage table nearby.
I think to myself, "What a nifty line! I can never think of
anything like that!" He starts to rub her big toe. "I think I feel it,"
he says. "I feel a kind of dent--is that the pituitary?"
I blurt out, "You're a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!"
They looked at me, horrified--I had blown my cover--and said,
"It's reflexology!"
I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating....MUCH MORE

Long time readers will recognize the words of the bongo drummer as amateur magician and author, Richard Feynman.

He was also a safecracker and lockpick.
He invented the word nanotechnology.
In 1965 he was awarded
the Nobel prize in physics for his work in quantum eletrodynamics.
The
above snip is from his 1974 Cal Tech commencement address "Cargo Cult Science".

Although Feynman loved to tell jokes the number of jokes about Feynman is rather small.